RE: Building a bridge from RDF to the web?

Andy,

I think where these examples fall short is that they presume a query
approach rather than assuming some sort of abstract model of variable
bindings for a result set.  The first example is using a path model,
which is troubling given the syntactic freedom of RDF/XML and given
the opportunity to deliver a response in N3 or other notations.  The
second example presumes that we are using a specific query language
with looping constructs into which we can embed the XML that we want
to generate.

What I have in mind is that variable bindings are generated by a query
against the RDF data model -- and that those bindings should expose a
(cannonical) abstract model of the query response SUCH THAT an XSL
processor can consume those bindings and people can reliable match
on the contents of the bindings in order to generate XML.  Much in
the same way that XSL and XPath are connected by the notion of a
"node set" which is generated by XPath and consumed by XSL.

Maybe I am off base, but I guess the question is "If variable bindings
are the interface into the query result that we expose to the client,
can the client successfully use that interface to generate arbitrary
XML?"

-bryan

-----Original Message-----
From: Seaborne, Andy
To: Thompson, Bryan B.; ''public-rdf-dawg@w3.org' '
Sent: 5/25/2004 8:27 AM
Subject: RE: Building a bridge from RDF to the web?



-------- Original Message --------
> From: Thompson, Bryan B. <mailto:BRYAN.B.THOMPSON@saic.com>
> Date: 25 May 2004 13:13
> 
> Andy,
> 
> You wrote:
> 
> > If that bridge is a way to extract information from RDF models and
> > get it into both XHTML (for people) and XML (for people and for
> > web services), then I agree with you.
> 
> Variable bindings certainly seem to be a good place to start in order
> for the client to be able to avoid posing the query twice - once to
> the RDF store and once to the identified sub-graph (and possible using
> a different kind of query interface altogether!)
> 
> So, can you outline for me how you see that variable bindings exposed
> by a DAWG protocol could be exploited by an XML Stylesheet so as to
> generate, e.g., an XHTML document?
> 
> -bryan

Rather than an on-the-fly design, how about from the examples of systems
that have tried this:

---------------------

From: http://rdfweb.org/people/damian/treehugger/introduction.html
Treehugger example:

<xsl:for-each 
  select="./rss:items/rdf:Seq/rdf:li/rdf:Resource">
     ...
     do something with each member of the sequence
     ...
</xsl:for-each>

A path is Treehugger is property/class/property/class - I prefer a
property/property/property path but that isn't relevant here.

So make/replace the "select" attribute be a graph pattern.  Need to cope
with multiple variables in the query string.

---------------------

From Jonathan Robie's talk:
http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/tp-robie/slide4-0.html

declare namespace rdf = "rdf.tagsalad.org";

for $artist in rdf:instance-of-class(rdf:predicate-domain("c:creates"))
let $artifact := rdf:join-on-property($artist, "c:creates"),
    $museum := rdf:join-on-property($artifact, "c:exhibited")
return 
    <result>
       <artist>{ $artist }</artist>
       <artifact>{ $artifact }</artifact>
       <museum>{ $museum }</museum>
    </result>

---------------------

Can one write in Xquery:
   $var1 $var2 := someQueryFunction("graph pattern")
If so, then this would be a more compact form.

Bryan - is this what you had in mind?

	Andy



> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Seaborne, Andy
> To: Thompson, Bryan B.; 'public-rdf-dawg@w3.org'
> Sent: 5/25/2004 6:39 AM
> Subject: RE: Building a bridge from RDF to the web?
> 
> > From: Thompson, Bryan B. <>
> > Date: 24 May 2004 20:49
> > 
> > One of the issues that became clear to me during the recent WWW
> > meeting in NYC is that we are missing a bridge between the RDF model
> > and XML. In particular, people who are going to be using the
semantic
> > web need a bridge from the RDF data model to application specific
XML
> > vocabularies (actually, we need one that goes the other way also,
but
> > that is, I think, a seperate question).  Perhaps the most common use
> > case is querying an RDF resource and using the results to drive an
XSL
> > Transform, which in turn might generate XHTML.
> 
> If that bridge is a way to extract information from RDF models and get
> it
> into both XHTML (for people) and XML (for people and for web
services),
> then
> I agree with you.  There isn't going to be one such form for
presenting
> information extracted from RDF so tools such as XSLT and XQuery seem
to
> be
> the toolsets to use.
> 
> There has been some work on this: Rob outlined the use of XQuery and
OWL
> data, and it reminded me of Jonathan Robie's presentation [1] at
Cannes
> this
> year.  The important aspect here is that access is to the abstract
> graph,
> not the RDF/XML syntax.
> 
> Elsewhere, Howard talked about using paths to access the graph and
> Treehugger [2] does this by dymanically materialising an XML document
> from
> the RDF abstract graph.
> 
> This is getting stuff out of RDF.  The requirement it places on the
WG,
> as I
> see it, is to produce a format for variable bindings that is easily
> digestable by other systems.  That does not automatically mean an XML
> format
> because it is the output of XQuery functions but an XML format would
> work
> (it can be made streamable which RDF isn't).
> 
> I have also seem people do queries in JSP taglibs to produce HTML and
> also
> using Velocity to create XHTML from RDF - a standard library to do the
> variable bindings to Velocity
> 
> > 
> > This issue has been more or less discussed in the context of
> > templates, which did not receive strong support at the first f2f as
a
> > requirement for DAWG.
> 
> IIRC the "Templates" discussion was slightly different.  Its about
> constructing new RDF from information pulled from existing RDF.  See
the
> SeRQL 'construct' [3] operation or "cwm --filter".
> 
> >  However I think that NOT having this is going to be a major
> > stumbling block for adoption of the DAWG recommendation by
application
> > developers and is going to make it very difficult to get at that
sense
> > of loose coupling and content reuse that makes the web so exciting.
> > 
> > I would like to get a sense from people of how a DAWG spec could
best
> > facilitate this.  Do we need to do this ourselves?  Can we expose
the
> > data model query language in such a way that it can be usefully
> > applied by XSL Transforms?  Should this be considered out of scope
> > for the charter? 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > -bryan
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/tp-robie/
> [2] http://rdfweb.org/people/damian/treehugger/
> [3] http://www.openrdf.org/doc/users/ch05.html#d0e1101

Received on Tuesday, 25 May 2004 08:54:36 UTC